Rovio Entertainment, the Finnish company whose “Angry Birds” app has now been downloaded over 1 billion times, announced its first book app, an iOS cookbook app called “Bad Piggies’ Best Egg Recipes,” at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Thursday afternoon.

The print version of the book, which Rovio published last year, goes by the same title, but the app is “not just a book,” said Peter Vesterbacka, Angry Birds CMO. “We took the content from the book, 41 egg recipes, but didn’t want to just take the book, make a PDF and sell it to people. We actually made it a lot more interactive.”

“Bad Piggies’ Best Egg Recipes” is on sale for an introductory price of $0.99 or €0.79 in the iTunes Store and includes step-by-step photo instructions, an egg timer and photos of the finished dishes. Users can also upload their own pictures of the recipes they make. A Chinese-language version of the app, featuring some additional recipes and photos, will be available in the Chinese app store soon.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

Why is this such a frikkin big deal?

Because this is the price of the print edition:

Click = big

So they are selling an app-book for one-tenth of the print version’s discount price. One-tenth!

It’s Thursday, but I just know they’ve started to break out the liquor in NYC at the publishing houses without waiting for tomorrow, their traditional day! All of them thought app-books would lead to an increase in price and profits through fatter margins!

And this:

“We’re not looking thousands or tens of thousands of downloads,” he [Peter Vesterbacka, Angry Birds CMO] continued, “we’re looking for millions of downloads of this book…We’re going for massive, massive volume.”

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

He gets it. None of the Big Six of publishing — or the Little Sixes of it — do.

What if the Big Six started massively discounting their frontlist titles, going for that volume instead of trying to bleed each reader for the most they could squeeze out of them? They’d be able to transition their businesses to e faster and make lots more money in the process — and also help to thwart piracy!

3 responses to “Angry Birds Overturn The Book Publishing Cart”

Finally, a little sense in the eBook world. I agree, $9.99 for a book I could buy at the library sale for 25cents is an OUTRAGEOUS markup. And, I can’t give it back to the library for them to see again when I’m done. I am a voracious reader and go through two to three paperbacks a week. I’d go broke doing it using eBooks. If the publishers would have some 99cent deals, I’d bite. But to pay ten to twenty times that? Hellsnooo